If Matthew Stafford Is a Hall of Famer, So Is Matt Ryan

After years of putting up fantastic numbers on mostly woeful teams in Detroit, Matthew Stafford finally shipped out to Los Angeles and led a team to a Super Bowl. When all is said and done, that's probably going to be enough to push him over the edge and into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. And that's all well and good. Stafford is going to have nearly two decades of top-end production and a ring when his career is over.

But if you think Stafford should be in the Hall of Fame and don't say a word about Matt Ryan, we need to sit down and have a talk.

I understand that, for whatever reason, Super Bowls seem to be a sticking point for people when having football Hall of Fame discussions — I feel like Stafford should completely invalidate that point, given the fact he was the exact same player this year as he has been his entire career and the only difference was his supporting cast, but I digress. I also understand all too well that Ryan's team did not win the Super Bowl it reached and in which it had a 25-point lead. But if your argument for Ryan not being a Hall of Fame quarterback is that Kyle Shanahan lost his mind for a few minutes and the Falcons' defense decided to not be able to stop a nose bleed, why do we even have a Hall of Fame for individuals? Let's just make it a team Hall of Fame and put the best teams in. In that case, you're correct: the 2016 Falcons shouldn't make it.

Ryan has had maybe three defenses in his career which I would describe as "good." His best head coach was Mike Smith. If the Falcons had anyone even one step below Ryan playing quarterback for the last 14 years, I'm not sure they'd have made the playoffs once. Of all the problems Atlanta has had over the course of his career, Ryan has never been one of them.

Even Nick Wright came very close to having a good take yesterday before going off about quarterbacks playing "in this era," as if every team in the League has a quarterback putting up 4,500 yards a season.

Ryan has won an MVP award, been selected to four Pro Bowls and led one of the greatest offenses in NFL history which would have won a Super Bowl if it had coaches who didn't piss down their legs in the biggest moment of their careers.

Stafford does not have a single statistic better than Ryan. If the argument comes down to one Super Bowl ring — when Stafford got to go to a ready-made title contender and Ryan left the field with the lead in Super Bowl LI and never touched the ball again — that's a really terrible argument.

If you want to say neither belongs in the Hall of Fame, that's a take you can have, I guess. But Stafford can't be a Hall of Famer if Ryan isn't.